Along with many others I have had this problem on my laptop with all versions of Puppy to 1.0.6 and there has been no real solution forthcoming – so far!

My workaround was to put the compressed files from the CD on my hard drive and boot from there using Grub. There are a number of previous posts on doing this so you might like to have a look at the following:

Now, I have recently been testing the Puppy 1.0.7 alpha (from http://www.pupweb.org/test/ ) on my laptop and it finds the kernel fine and boots as normal – so this may be another possibility to look at.

Bear in mind that an alpha release may mean it has more bugs than normal and is not a formal release. Do anything at your own risk, caveat emptor and all that!